derelict house on my block

hey all, forgive the long backstory that follows, I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on with a derelict building on my block, and I’m hoping some of the people on here that understand NYC’s byzantine building codes might offer some advice. There’s a 4-story brownstone on my block in PLG that’s been boarded up/derelict for at least a decade. From poking around on ACRIS/BISweb and other city sites, I’ve tracked down the owner, who appears to own over a dozen properties around Brooklyn, including both the adjacent brownstones to this derelict one. Those two are both occupied and in decent enough shape, but for some reason the owner is letting the one in the middle rot. It’s a total eyesore, and appears to have SRO status. There was a permit application in 2011 to renovate and build a rear extension, which was disapproved. The BISweb site says:”Development Challenge Process is pending Zoning Approval. ” There’s been no change in the development application status in two years. A year ago, according to ACRIS, the building filed both a Certificate and a Zoning Lot Description as a 6-Family. I have no idea whether this means some sort of progress has been made.  I tracked down the owner at one point, and asked her what her plans were for the building–basically I was just tired of looking at it for years. One of the neighbors says it’s occupied by a family of raccoons. The owner told me a year ago she had plans to develop it, but there appears to have been zero progress toward that.  Can anyone suggest any approaches/strategies/persuasions I could employ to help prompt a landlord to actually fix up their derelict building? I’m under no illusion that I have rights in this situation: it’s their property and they can do whatever they like as long as they pay their taxes. But I find it astonishing, given the totally insane housing market and the huge demand for rentals in Brooklyn, that someone could just leave a place to rot for a decade or more. They could have paid for a renovation many times over by this point.

You can thank insanely low real estate taxes to providing a nearly free in-the-money call option to the owner.  But to answer your question, my best guess would be that the owner has poor credit to get the project jumpstarted.